Conservatives for same-sex
marriage.New York Times columnist William Safire isn't
exactly in love with the idea. But this morning he sounds like he's
ready to put the culture wars to rest and accept the
inevitability of same-sex marriage.

The clincher: "I used to fret about
same-sex marriage. Maybe competition from responsible gays would
revive opposite-sex marriage."

If you haven't read it yet -- and
you must -- here is the Phoenix's Susan Ryan-Vollmar this week
on "The
Case for Same-Sex Marriage."
It's a no-brainer -- but, tragically, many people have no
brain.

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Lydon on Raines. Burrowing
more deeply into Christopher Lydon's weblog, I just read
his
June 6 post on the
resignation of New York Times executive editor Howell
Raines.

Obligatory triple back-scratch: I'd
seen it yesterday but didn't have time to read it. Al
Giordano credits me with
leading him to Lydon's blog -- and now he's leading me back to
Lydon's Times post.

Anyway, if you can only force
yourself to read one more thing on the downfall of Raines, read
Lydon. He writes:

If Howell Raines is to be
held responsible for serious lapses, let it be for the Times'
pusillanamity around the unnecessary war that the Bush team
slipped past the Congress and the sleeping watchmen in the serious
press.

Friday, June 27, 2003

Sodomites 6, theo-fascists
3. US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia gets it exactly right.
Commenting on the Court's six-to-three decision throwing out the
Texas sodomy law and, in effect, virtually legalizing same-sex
relations, a
bitter and angry Scalia
accuses his colleagues of having "taken sides in the culture war" and
having "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual
agenda."

Damn straight! This week has really
been a wondrous one for progressives, who've gone from looking at the
Court as a virtual extension of the Bush presidency -- whose very
existence it had hurried into being -- to, surprisingly, a last
bastion of justice.

Earlier this week, of course, the
Court
upheld affirmative action
in college admissions, although rigid quota systems will not be
allowed. Unfortunately, the court made a bad call in upholding a law
ordering public libraries that receive federal funding to filter out
Internet
porn. But the republic will
survive that a whole lot better than it would have survived bad
decisions in the sodomy and affirmative-action cases.

These stunningly good decisions are
accompanied by recent buzz that, contrary to longstanding rumor, none
of the justices is seriously contemplating retirement.

Media Log's theory: buyer's
remorse. When five justices rushed to hand the presidency to George
W. Bush two and a half years ago, they may have seen him as a
garden-variety conservative cut from the same mold as his
father.

Now that they -- or at least Sandra
Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, the most moderate of the five
conservatives -- have gotten a look at how radical Bush really is,
they've decided to stay put for as long as they can.

Christopher Lydon, natural-born
blogger. While the Supreme Court is kicking up its heels, we
continue to be hampered by a quiescent and complacent
press.

I've been negligent in not giving a
plug to a newish blog by veteran journalist Christopher
Lydon, although I have no
doubt that his many fans have discovered it anyway.

But here
it is -- and the most
recent entry is a link to a terrific column by Newsday's Jimmy
Breslin, who is appalled at the way his younger colleagues accept the
secrecy with which the government is fighting the war against terror.
Says Breslin: "You believe the FBI, you belong back in public
school."

Lydon also offers some intriguing
thoughts on Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A God for Bloggers" ("He is a man
for bloggers to embrace most especially, not for Emerson's glory but
for our own understanding of a transformative moment we are living
through"), and on the internecine warfare at the New York
Times.

Reading and drinking. I'll
be reading tonight between 7 and 9 p.m. as part of the
Writers
with Drinks series at the
Lizard Lounge, at 1667 Mass Ave, in Cambridge. I'll definitely be
doing something from the political-media axis, but I may have a
surprise as well. So drop in if you get a chance.

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Scatology and the law.Denver Post editor Greg Moore -- the former managing editor of
the Boston Globe -- is reportedly being sued over a barnyard
metaphor he offered in the Post newsroom to explain why he'd
fired a veteran editor.

According to Westword's
Michael
Roberts (scroll down to
"Back to the barnyard"), Moore helpfully explained to his staff that
he'd gotten rid of assistant city editor Arnie Rosenberg because "the
way to clean up a place is not to move manure around the barnyard."
Holy shit! (Via Romenesko.)

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

We live in a political
world. And whether we are about to be done in by human-caused
global warming depends very much on your political
perspective.

David
Appell has a good piece in
Scientific American over a new study by two scientists at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics that purports to show
that there's nothing to worry about. It seems that the consensus view
among their colleagues, though, is that global warming is real and
the study is deeply flawed.

The best quote: "You'd be
challenged, I'd bet, to find someone who supports the Kyoto Protocol
and also thinks that this paper is good science, or someone who
thinks that the paper is bad science and is opposed to Kyoto."

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

More on the WMD deception.
Can the Bush administration's deceptions about Iraq's
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities blossom into a real issue?
(I don't mean just for the Democrats, but for anyone who cares about
our ability to obtain enough honest information to be able to govern
ourselves.) Two newish pieces suggest that the Great WMD Deceit isn't
going away.

First, this week's New
Republic -- perhaps the most significant liberal organ to support
the war in Iraq -- has a long cover essay this week by John Judis and
Spencer Ackerman documenting in convincing detail how the White House
continually cooked intelligence reports to make it look like Iraq had
both extensive WMD capabilities (including nukes) and ties to Al
Qaeda.

Judis and Ackerman revisit the
matters of the aluminum tubes and the forged uranium documents from
Niger. More important, though, they show an overarching strategy to
pressure intelligence officials -- right up to and including CIA
director George Tenet -- to make assertions that weren't true in
order to stoke war fever.

Unlike most TNR content,
this article is freely
available online. Read it.
And ask yourself why Tenet, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Dick
Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld -- at a minimum -- haven't been
subpoenaed to testify before Congress about their public
prevarications. Can you say "Gulf of Tonkin"?

The second piece is Sunday's column
by the Washington Post's George
Will, reprinted in Monday's
Boston Globe. Will doesn't say anything startling except for
the fact that it is he -- the staunch old Republican warhorse and
adviser to Ronald Reagan -- who's saying it. Writes Will:

Some say the war was
justified even if WMD are not found nor their destruction
explained, because the world is "better off" without Saddam
Hussein. Of course it is better off. But unless one is prepared to
postulate a U.S. right, perhaps even a duty, to militarily
dismantle any tyranny -- on to Burma? -- it is unacceptable to
argue that Hussein's mass graves and torture chambers suffice as
retrospective justifications for preemptive war. Americans seem
sanguine about the failure -- so far -- to validate the war's
premise about the threat posed by Hussein's WMD, but a long-term
failure would unravel much of this president's policy and
rhetoric.

Good Reaganite that he is, Will
holds out the possibility that Saddam's WMDs were removed before the
US invasion, and/or that they will eventually be found. But there's
no mistaking Will's general thrust: his bowtie is spinning in
consternation.

In light of the daily updates from
Iraq -- continued
fighting, and the possible
emergence of a radical
Shiite theocracy -- you'd
have to be Ari Fleischer to pretend to be pleased with the way this
is playing out.

The Penguin and the Apple.
Even as Apple
Computer rolls out a new
line of sexy products, Slate's Paul Boutin writes that the
Macintosh operating system will soon slip
into third place, behind
Linux, in the number of personal computers on which it is
installed.

Boutin references a
Business Week article,
but offers additional analysis suggesting that third place is,
essentially, where they put intensive-care patients who aren't likely
to recover.

Monday, June 23, 2003

Some thoughts about the "M"
word. In a piece for yesterday's "Week in Review" section in the
New York Times, Natalie
Angier considers the
possibility that some short adolescent males will be given human
growth hormone (hGH) in order to add a few inches.

She is talking about boys whose
height is not the result of any medical or genetic condition, and is
merely on the low side of normal. By contrast, she notes, hGH has
long been given to children -- boys and girls -- who have a type of
dwarfism known as growth-hormone deficiency. She writes that "without
the treatment, they would be true midgets, perhaps under four feet
tall as adults; with the shots, they are brought up to low-normal
heights."

Her use of the word midget
is interesting. Angier probably doesn't know this, but the M-word has
long been considered offensive within the dwarf community, in much
the same way as the N-word is considered unacceptable to
African-Americans. That is, a few dwarfs might toss the M-word at
each other as kind of an inside joke, but virtually no one wants to
hear outsiders use it.

Yet Angier's use of the phrase
true midget suggests something else -- that there is an
actual, clinical definition of the word. And in fact, the M-word has
long been restricted to those whose profound short stature is the
result of growth-hormone deficiency or some other endocrinological
cause. These people's proportions -- their arms, legs, head, and
torso -- are the same as those of "average-size people," the
politically correct term for the vast majority of us who are
unaffected by any kind of dwarfism.

By contrast, dwarf has
traditionally been reserved for people who have one or another type
of skeletal dysplasia -- that is, genetic and/or medical conditions
affecting bone development. These people, who constitute the vast
majority of the profoundly short statured, tend to have average-size
torsos, slightly larger-than-average heads, and exceedingly short
arms and legs.

So is there a good reason to
distinguish between midgets and dwarfs? Not really. The
origins of dwarf are ancient. By contrast, midget is a
made-up word whose lineage can only be traced to 1865 or
so.

The American
Heritage Dictionary
gives this as the first definition of the word: "Offensive An
extremely small person who is otherwise normally proportioned." So
even though the AHD embraces Angier's meaning, it also notes
that its use is discouraged.

The Oxford English
Dictionary (not freely available online) gets closer to the heart
of the matter:
"An extremely small person;
spec. such a person publicly exhibited as a curiosity." No
mention of proportionality, by the way. Thus, according to the
OED, the M-word is closely tied to the idea of public
performance -- of the side show, the freak show, with such latter-day
offshoots as midget wrestling and midget porn. No wonder it came to
be considered offensive.

Midget is sometimes thought
to have been coined by P.T. Barnum, but such is not the case. Barnum,
of course, was the employer of Charles Stratton and Lavinia Warren --
two proportionate dwarfs who were better known as General and Mrs.
Tom Thumb. If the M-word could accurately describe anyone, it was
surely they. Yet in Barnum's 1855 autobiography, he describes both
Strattons as dwarfs. The reason is simple enough: the M-word
had not yet been invented.

These things tend to come full
circle. Next week, hundreds of dwarfs will arrived in Greater Boston
for the annual conference of Little
People of America. Among
the more politically aware members, there continues to be a simmering
debate over terminology. Some would like to reclaim midget as
their own; others do not want to hear the word at all, thank you very
much.

Obviously the most important thing
to keep in mind is that LPA's members are all individuals.
Dwarf is a lot better than midget, but the person's
name is best of all. This is the first national LPA conference to be
held in the Boston area since 1983. Boston is not renowned for making
visitors feel welcome, but maybe this time we can make an
exception.

Friday, June 20, 2003

Commissioner Connolly? Media
Log feels obligated to say something about yesterday's
congressional testimony by UMass president Bill Bulger, in which the
witness appeared to have studied method acting with an Alzheimer's
patient. But what?

Globe columnist Brian
McGrory's assessment this morning is overly
sympathetic to Bulger, but
he gets this much right: "It promised high drama. It delivered the
excitement of a raisin scone, but with none of the nutritional
value."

Of necessity, that was pretty much
true of the voluminous media coverage as well.

The Herald got things off to
a rocking good start yesterday with an investigative report that
Bulger's homicidal brother, mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, has
apparently been using a
Caribbean hideout while
attracting little interest from the FBI. Several
congressmen brought it up
during yesterday's questioning. But even Bill Bulger's most
vociferous detractors wouldn't accuse him of having anything to do
with that.

The Herald may have stumbled
onto another opportunity yesterday as well: Howie Carr Bobble-Head
Action Figures. I especially enjoyed watching him roll his eyes in
the instant replay on WFXT-TV (Channel 25) last night.

But absent anything truly arresting
(bad pun intended), the prize will go to the first reporter who can
get former Boston mayor Ray Flynn to talk about Bulger's hazily
admitted effort to get his buddy John Connolly, the corrupt ex-FBI
agent, named as Boston's police commissioner.

Bulger was diffident about the
matter, acting as though he didn't even know who the mayor was at the
time. But Herald columnist Peter
Gelzinis (subscription
required) says this morning:

Though Flynn did not
respond to phone calls yesterday, in a conversation several years
ago he spoke of the "intense pressure from the State House" to
appoint John Connolly police commissioner. Consider the horror of
that for a moment. Life in Boston would have resembled a scene out
of "Blade Runner," or worse, Baghdad under Saddam. Boston's cops
would've been Whitey's cops.

Flynn, of course, did the right
thing and appointed Mickey Roache as his commissioner. Roache's
tenure was troubled, to put it mildly. But he was honest. Certainly
he wouldn't have looked the other way as prized informants tortured
and killed their enemies.

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Updating the scorecard.
Check out this
letter to the Globe
from state Democratic Party chairman Phil Johnston. Johnston takes
issue with a June 16 op-ed piece by Kennedy School lecturer Mickey
Edwards, a former Republican congressman and former Herald
columnist. (Edwards's column is no longer freely available
online.)

Edwards, making fun of the recent
Democratic state convention for adopting an ideological "scorecard"
for elected officials, wrote:

That's where Phil Johnston
and the Democrats come in. Johnston, the state's Democratic Party
chairman, presided a week ago over a state convention at which
approximately 1,000 party activists voted to produce a "scorecard"
rating members of the Legislature on their fealty to the state
party platform.

Johnston:

On several occasions I
have stated my opposition to the "legislative scorecard" adopted
by delegates at the June 7 convention.

And here's what Johnston told
Globe columnist Scot Lehigh on June 11: "It is a rather
bizarre idea, one that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to
implement. And I don't think it is helpful to Democratic candidates."

Advantage: Phil. Edwards uses
implication rather than direct assertion, but the tenor of his column
suggests that Johnston was all but demanding that the delegates
support the scorecard idea.

Ah, but then Johnston gets carried
away, writing:

A secondary point also
requires correction: There were 3,000 delegates at the convention,
not 1,000, as Edwards reported.

But that's not even remotely what
Edwards said. Here's what Raphael Lewis reported in the Globe
on June 10:

At Saturday's convention,
Johnston allowed the report card vote to take place, even though
fewer than half of the 2,265 delegates who attended the convention
at Lowell's Paul E. Tsongas Arena remained. The reason, Johnston
said, was that it did not mention any one lawmaker by name.

Now, I can't explain the
discrepancy between Johnston's figure of 3000 delegates and Lewis's
2,265. Johnston may have been including alternates. But if, as Lewis
reported, "fewer than half of the 2,265 delegates" were on hand for
the scorecard vote, then Edwards had it almost exactly right when he
asserted that "approximately 1,000 party activists voted to produce a
'scorecard' rating."

Almost, I say, because nearly
every single delegate still present would have had to vote "aye"
for Edwards's statement to be wholly accurate.

New in this week's
Phoenix. The Herald, beset by sliding circulation,
goes
back to its tabloid roots,
even as publisher Pat Purcell ponders whether to buy more media
properties -- or, ultimately, to sell.

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Redefining the e-newspaper.
David Gelernter is identified as a "professor of computer science at
Yale," so maybe I'm just too dense to understand what he's talking
about.

But in his cover essay for the
current Weekly Standard, he argues that the "Next
Great American Newspaper"
will be conservative (we'll see about that), published on the Web
(he's probably right), and implemented in a far more appealing and
useful way than today's electronic papers. He writes:

[T]oday's
web-papers are wedge-ins, stop-gaps, crack fillers, with all the
character of putty in a plastic spritz-tube; people read them not
for pleasure and illumination but to extract a necessary fact or
kill time when they are stuck at their desks. Their builders don't
seem to have grasped what makes the newsprint newspaper one of
design history's greatest achievements.

I'm not going to disagree.
Otherwise, why would we have four daily papers delivered to our house
every day? But, as far as I can tell, e-papers are implemented about
as well as today's hardware (limited portability, good-but-not-great
displays, faster-but-not-fast-enough access) will allow
for.

So what does Gelernter have in mind
as an alternative?

Imagine a parade of jumbo
index cards standing like set-up dominoes. On your computer
display, the parade of index cards stretches into the simulated
depths of your screen, from the middle-bottom (where the
front-most card stands, looking big) to the farthest-away card in
the upper left corner (looking small). Now, something happens:
Tony Blair makes a speech. A new card materializes in front (a
report on the speech) and everyone else takes a step back--and the
farthest-away card falls off the screen and (temporarily)
disappears. So the parade is in constant motion. New stories keep
popping up in front, and the parade streams backwards to the
rear.

There's more to it, of course, but
that's where it begins: with cascading virtual index cards. This is a
big improvement? I'm unimpressed.

So who's "bizarre," anyway?
Perhaps a new record of sorts this morning. The Herald's
"Inside
Track" and the
Globe's "Names"
column both poke fun at Teresa Heinz Kerry for making "bizarre"
statements on the occasion of a speech she gave at the Fairmont Copy
Plaza.

Examples: none!

The Globe resorts to a
previous Heinz statement, which it paraphrases as "her needing
another Botox treatment" to back up its "bizarre" assertion. But the
only direct quote it can come up with from Monday's talk is "her
admonition to 'work to make this world a whole place.'" So now it appears that if she can get through a speech without saying anything "bizarre," that in itself is news. How bizarre.

The Track goes it several times
better, offering no direct quotes, but asserting that she gave
"a bizarre, rambling speech ... about hormones and the big, bad
pharmaceutical companies' conspiracy against women!" Here's the money
graf:

"It was endless, pointless
and confusing," said one politically connected chick. "And it was
far, far too technical as a dinner speech. I mean, the Latin names
of drugs? There was an exodus out the door before dessert."

At a reported length of 35 minutes,
Heinz might justifiably be accused of trying her listeners' patience.
But "bizarre"? Media Log is still waiting for even one bit of
evidence.

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Now in its third day, the series
accomplishes its institutional mission: being comprehensive enough
that no enterprising news org is likely to come in from the outside
and dig up any startling revelations about Kerry's past, thus
embarrassing the gumshoes at 135 Morrissey Boulevard.

At about 5000 words per
installment, it adds up to a small book, which it probably will
become once the series has run its course.

Slate's William Saletan is
stunned to discover that Kerry can be loose
and funny. "If he keeps
this up," Saletan writes, "he might actually become
president."

In the New Republic's online
"TNR
Primary" (open to
non-subscribers), my former Phoenix colleague Michael Crowley
-- who wrote an entertainingly (and perhaps excessively) tough
profile of Kerry last year -- gives him a "General Likeability" grade
of "A" on the campaign stump. Crowley also notes that the
Globe series reinforces Kerry's "special
moral authority" in going
up against the Hero of the Texas Air National Guard, George W.
Bush.

Time magazine columnist Joe
Klein follows up the favorable piece he did on Kerry in the New
Yorker last year by praising his health-care proposal. Calling it
"the
first significant new idea of this political
season," Klein says that
only Kerry's plan is responsible enough to restrict benefits to those
who need it the most.

Finally, another former Phoenician,
Al Giordano, on his new weblog Big,
Left, Outside, believes
that Kerry -- for whom he once worked, and whom he covered as the
Phoenix's political reporter in the mid-'90s -- can win ...
but only
if he gets in fighting trim.
Giordano writes:

Here's the key: To wake
Kerry up, you have to piss him off. You have to put his back up
against the wall and slam into him with everything you've got to
awaken his mutant powers. And then the real John Kerry stands up:
he's golden in those moments: American politics' version of the
Incredible Hulk. The American political highway is littered with
the higher political aspirations of former giants (Jim Shannon, Ed
Markey, Ray Shamie, Bill Weld, and a dozen or so others you
probably haven't heard of) slain by Kerry when he was
awake.

Microsoft seems to be playing this
very low-key, saying simply that Apple's Safari is all that Mac users
need, and that, in any case, Web browsers have become an integrated
part of the operating system. That was Bill Gates's argument during
all those years of the antitrust case, and he must find it satisfying
now to be able to say it about someone else -- even though the truth
of that proposition was always dubious at best.

But this is actually huge news,
Microsoft's first step away from Apple since Gates and Steve Jobs
embraced in the late 1990s. Microsoft claims that it's not going to
walk away from the really important products, such as the Mac version
of Microsoft Office, but who knows? If the next version of AppleWorks
is as compatible with Office as has been rumored, then all bets may
be off.

I've switched to Safari for nearly
all of my Web browsing, mainly because it's incredibly fast -- much
faster than Explorer or Mozilla. But it's still in beta, you don't
get page numbering or headers when you print (note: if I'm wrong,
send directions!), and there are a few sites that it doesn't work
with at all -- such as Blogger.com,
the engine that drives Media Log. For that, I use Mozilla.

I love my new iBook, and I would
hate to think that it will be my last Mac. But Microsoft's latest
could be the beginning of the end for Apple.

The hunt for common sense over
Iraq's WMDs. The hunt for weapons of mass destruction continues
in precisely the same manner that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is
still dead. Meanwhile, three must-reads:

1. Writing in the Ideas section of
yesterday's Boston Globe, Thomas
Powers observes that the
Bush administration's cynical use of dubious intelligence will harm
the US for many years into the future. By refusing to back the US and
Britain, the world community took a calculated risk: think of what
George W. Bush and Tony Blair would be saying today if we had found
chemical plants and nascent nuclear facilities inside Iraq. Instead,
France, Russia, et al. have all the more reason not to believe us the
next time. Maybe even the American people will wake up, although
that's probably asking way too much.

2. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein
really did have enormous amounts of WMDs, including nerve gas, and he
really did refuse to account for them after UN weapons inspections
resumed last fall. New York Times columnist Bill
Keller can't bring himself
to admit he was wrong in backing the war. But he is absolutely right
when he observes: "It was not a Bush administration fabrication that
Iraq had, and failed to account for, massive quantities of anthrax
and VX nerve gas and other biological and chemical weapons. Saddam
was under an international obligation to say where the poisons went,
but did not."

3. So why aren't more of the
Democratic presidential candidates speaking out? Because, as
Ryan
Lizza (subscription
required) notes in the New Republic, most of them are
complicit, having expended a good deal of energy in the run-up to the
war denouncing Saddam's WMD capabilities. The silent candidates
include John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, and Dick Gephardt.
Even Howard Dean, who was vociferously antiwar, is being cautious for
the moment -- perhaps, Lizza writes, out of concern that WMDs may
still be found. (Bob Graham is blasting the White House, but I think
we can agree that he doesn't matter -- at least not yet.)

Friday, June 13, 2003

Don't ask, don't tell, don't
live your life, just go away. Last month I wrote about a
heartening decision by Philadelphia scout executives to adopt a
nondiscrimination policy to protect gay
Boy Scouts and scout leaders.

Well, so much for that. Today's
Boston Globe carries a story from the Philadelphia
Inquirer reporting that the Cradle of Liberty Council had
ousted
an 18-year-old scout for
publicly coming out in the course of protesting against the national
Boy Scouts of America's discriminatory stance. Reporter Linda Harris
writes:

"He [scout -- uh,
former scout -- Gregory Lattera] decided to hold a
press conference to come out as a member of the gay community and
also a potential employee and past employee of the Boy Scouts,"
said [council leader William] Dwyer, who signed the letter
to Lattera. "Our staff knew he was gay and never made a big deal
about it. He decided to make a big deal about it. The don't ask,
don't tell policy is pretty clear."

The local antidiscrimination
policy approved in May, however, has no mention of don't ask,
don't tell.

Harris's suspicions concerning
"don't ask, don't tell" turn out to be well-founded. Because the news
in today's Inquirer is quite a bit worse: the Cradle of
Liberty Council has reversed
its antidiscrimination policy
after the national office, in Irving, Texas, threatened to revoke its
charter.

This is disturbing, of course, but
it's also puzzling. Surely council executives knew they were going to
have a fight on their hands when they decided to break with national.
If they were prepared to stop discriminating, then presumably they
were prepared to go it alone and set up some sort of alternative to
the national BSA.

As a Boy Scout volunteer and the
father of a scout, I was watching with great interest. I suspect that
plenty of councils -- perhaps even Boston's Minuteman Council, which
announced its own "don't ask, don't tell" policy last year -- would
have been prepared to join them.

According to the Inquirer,
the new policy reads: "Applications for leadership and membership do
not inquire into sexual orientation. However, an individual who
declares himself to be a homosexual would not be permitted to join
Scouting."

What's also disheartening is that
the Philadelphia executives are apparently gutless as well. Note that
point two of the council's statement says:

This non-discrimination
disclosure was directed to the use of United Way funds in the
Learning for Life program and was not, and was not intended to be,
an indication of any desire by the board to depart from the
National Council policies nor should it be construed as any
indication that Cradle of Liberty Council will fail to uphold any
policies of the Boy Scouts of America.

Yet here's what council
president David Lipson told
the Inquirer several weeks ago: "We disagree with the national
stance, and we're not comfortable with the stated national policy.
That's why we're working on a solution that works for everyone." He
added: "We'd like to move the discussion to standards for sexual
conduct rather than sexual orientation." (By the way, the
Inquirer calls Lipson the council's "board chairman," but the
BSA says he is the "president." I will assume that the BSA can at
least get that much right.)

Do Lipson's remarks sound like it
was all a misunderstanding, as the council's statement suggests? Of
course not. It's clear that the council was prepared to stop
discriminating -- period. Now it's backed off, and it's hung Lipson
out to dry -- as seen in this statement from Irving: "Cradle of
Liberty Council President David Lipson has expressed disagreement
with the BSA's membership policies, as is his right."

Yeah, that's right. It was just one
crazy liberal. Now we can all get back to normal.

Al Giordano update.
Narco
News Bulletin publisher
Al Giordano has started
a weblog. I have not had a
chance to read it, except for this -- "I think we can cause even MORE
trouble now with a blog." But it looks promising.

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Forbidden reading on the North
Shore. It can't happen here? Oh, yes it can -- and does. Leonard
Broughton, principal of the Masconomet Regional Middle School, which
serves the well-to-do towns of Topsfield, Boxford, and Middleton, has
decided to remove two gay-theme books aimed at young people from the
school's summer reading list.

"We don't [believe in]
teaching values," Broughton told Ben Casselman of the Salem
News. "When it comes to these kinds of value decisions, they are
up to the individuals and their families."

Did it ever occur to Broughton that
by engaging in such puerile censorship, he's condoning a particularly
harmful sort of values education?

The books in question -- Nancy
Garden's Annie on My Mind and Marilyn Reynolds's Love
Rules -- are said to be aimed specifically at teenagers, which
makes Broughton's decision all the more inexplicable.

The Salem News website is an
enigma, but if you click here,
you should be able to read the story until sometime this afternoon.
After that, try this.

New in this week's
Phoenix. With Boston Globe editor Marty
Baron's name prominently in
the mix as the next executive editor or managing editor of the New
York Times, staffers at 135 Morrissey Boulevard ponder what's
next.

Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Beacon Hill freezeout.
Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation president Michael Widmer is
the best kind of conservative, a numbers guy who knows what he's
talking about. His take on the state budget is invariably more
credible than those of the legislature and the governor. So what does
the Romney administration do? Why, freeze him out, of
course.

According to Boston Herald
columnist Cosmo
Macero (subscription
required), Widmer can't get his calls returned because he's had the
temerity to point out that, though some of Governor Mitt Romney's
reform ideas may be worthy, they don't add up to nearly enough money
to close the budget gap. Widmer has also reportedly let it be known
that he holds Eric Kriss, the secretary of administration and
finance, in low regard.

Widmer tells Macero: "What I found
in working with other A&F secretaries is that if you build [a
cooperative] relationship, it can be helpful all around. We're
trying to help solve problems. It may be [Kriss] is not
comfortable having that kind of relationship. That's his call. I
certainly understand that. But I've been puzzled."

Widmer could be Romney's staunchest
outside ally. That he is not says more about Romney than it does
about Widmer.

Back to mum. For the past
couple of weeks, the formerly talkative pitcher known as Pedro
Martinez has been talking again as he rehabs from a muscle pull. He
was especially loquacious in the Globe this morning,
expressing concern to columnist
Jackie MacMullan about
pitching coach Tony Cloninger, who's being treated for
cancer.

But no more, apparently. Because
Martinez tells the
Herald's Tony Massarotti
that, now that he's pitching again, he's zipping his lips. "After
[tonight], no more talking again," Martinez says. "Back to
normal."

Despite an utter lack of pitching,
the Red Sox continue to hover around first place. Yet this is somehow
a distinctly unlovable team. Martinez's silence isn't the whole
reason by any means, but it's part of it.

A memorable pan. I have not
yet read Hillary Clinton's Living History, so I can't judge
the fairness of Michiko
Kakutani's review in
yesterday's New York Times. But I can say this: it's really
mean, and it's really entertaining.

A highlight: "Overall the book has
the overprocessed taste of a stump speech, the calculated polish of a
string of anecdotes to be delivered on a television chat
show."

Tuesday, June 10, 2003

Life after Finneran. The
Boston Globe's Joan
Vennochi has a good column
today on state representative Harriett Stanley, who was stripped of
her leadership position earlier this year after crossing House
Speaker Tom Finneran. Stanley went from being a Somebody to a shunned
backbencher who can't even get a trash can delivered to her
office.

What's ironic about all this is
that Stanley really has something to contribute. The evidence: a
recent award she won from the Pioneer Institute for what is described
as an innovative health-care-reform idea. I'll take Vennochi's and
the institute's word for it, since the idea isn't actually described,
although it has something to do with "re-engineer[ing]
Medicaid."

As Vennochi observes, Finneran's
love of power has grown so intense that he now routinely puts
politics over policy -- something that would have been a surprise to
anyone who was following his career 10 years ago.

And Finneran is still pushing for
even more power, as the Globe's Rick
Klein explains.

Meanwhile, Boston Herald
columnist Wayne
Woodlief (registration
required) takes on the sorry state of the Democrats, noting that by
booing state attorney general Tom Reilly at last Saturday's issues
convention, they were booing one of their strongest potential
candidates for governor in 2006. All because Reilly wants (gasp!)
UMass president Bill Bulger to resign.

Woodlief compares the rude
reception Reilly received to Finneran's characterization of 1998
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Scott Harshbarger as part of the
"loony left," an outburst that contributed to Harshbarger's
defeat.

At least state Democratic chairman
Phil Johnston has a grasp on reality, telling Woodlief: "If Reilly
decides to run he'd be very strong. He's viewed as a straight-shooter
and a suburban reformer, not a captive of Beacon Hill politics.
That's the type we need to beat Romney."

Reilly is also pretty conservative
-- maybe too much so for a party that needs to distinguish itself
from the Republicans. But at least he's got a backbone.

Names and faces. The
Globe today withholds
the name and photo of that
nine-year-old kidnap victim from California now that police are
reporting she was sexually assaulted, inserting this into an
Associated Press story: "The Globe's policy is not to identify
victims of sexual assault without their permission."

The print edition of the
Herald runs both her name and photo, although -- as I write
this -- neither has been posted on the paper's website.

As with the Herald,
the
Washington Post's website
runs the AP story with the girl's name. The photo, though, is of a
police cruiser in front of the suspect's house.

The New
York Times ran the AP
story with the girl's name, but with the sexual-assault charge edited
out. The print edition -- but not the Web version -- includes a photo
of her.

The girl's hometown paper, the
San
Jose Mercury News,
withholds both her name and the sexual-assault allegation,
although it does get her last name out there by identifying
her mother. (I am relying
on stories that the Mercury posted on its website yesterday,
and which are still up this morning. Perhaps today's print edition is
different.)

So what's the right answer? This is
a difficult call, given that everyone knew her name as recently as
yesterday. I'm withholding the name here -- even though you can find
it out just by following some of the links I've posted -- because if
I had to choose, it would be on the side of nondisclosure.

The victim and her family are not
public people, and, even though her name and face had briefly been
everywhere, they will quickly be forgotten -- as they should be, and
as I'm sure they want to be.

A terrible thing happened to a
nine-year-old girl. Now that she's home, the best thing to do is to
restore her privacy as quickly as possible.

Monday, June 09, 2003

The Anywhere Times.
As New York Times scandals go, this is pretty minor. But
surely some readers -- especially NYC expats -- are going to think
it's scandalous that the paper has decided occasionally to
publish
different editorials in its
national and metro editions.

In "A Note to Our Readers," the
Times says:

Today, for instance,
readers in the New York metropolitan area will see an editorial
about the need for reform of the lobbying laws in Albany in the
place where national readers have an editorial on policies toward
the homeless. Both pieces can be read on the Times Web site, and
both will be included in the paper's permanent databank under
today's date.

In Boston, we get neither the
national nor the metro edition but, rather, the New England edition,
which is beefier than the national but thinner than the metro. The
note doesn't address which editorials we New Englanders would get,
but I checked and, sure enough, there's one on homelessness and none
on the shenanigans in Albany.

Although some ex-New Yorkers will
never get over no longer being able to get the full hometown paper
here, the saving grace had always been that all editions had the same
front pages and -- until now -- the same editorial pages.

I understand the impulse not to
bore a national audience with matters of strictly local concern. But
one of the charms of the Times is that it's a New York
paper. Take out the NY, and it's less interesting. One of the things
that David Remnick has done to improve the New Yorker, for
instance, is give it more of a New York feel. Even a staunch
Bostonian such as Media Log appreciates a sense of place.

Besides, the Times has taken
one large step toward rezoning hell, where you never know what good
stuff you might be missing. Yes, I know I can go to the Web, but in
that case, why do we get the Times delivered at
home?

Trouble for DeLay? Maybe it
will come to nothing. But the overweening arrogance of House majority
leader Tom "The Exterminator" DeLay may finally be getting him in
trouble, according to the Washington Post.

On Friday, the Post's
Thomas
Edsall reported that DeLay
was one of four members of Congress who split $56,500 from a troubled
Kansas-based company called Westar Energy. Building on reporting done
by the Kansas City Star, Edsall wrote about company e-mails
stating that the donations to the four Republican lawmakers were
aimed at getting them to vote in favor of repealing a federal
regulation that was not to Westar executives' liking.

In a follow-up
on Saturday, Edsall and Juliet Eilperin noted that, last September,
the Wichita Eagle reported that repeal of the regulation could
have brought $27 million to two Westar executives.

DeLay's office has strongly denied
that there was any quid pro quo. But this story bears
watching.

Also on Saturday, Post
reporter R. Jeffrey Smith had a long recap of the efforts of Texas
Republicans to chase
down fleeing Democrats so
they could get a quorum in the legislature and ram through a
redistricting bill.

The story centers on the way three
federal agencies -- including the Department of Homeland Security,
which is supposed to track terrorists -- were used to find the
Democrats, many of whom had crossed the border into Oklahoma so they
couldn't be dragooned back to Austin. DeLay's involvement is
recounted in quite a bit more detail than I've seen
previously.

Saturday, June 07, 2003

Somewhere it had stuck in my head
that Trausch had taken one of the buyouts a couple of years ago. But
I've received two e-mails -- including one from her husband! --
telling me that she is still working as an editorial writer for the
paper.

I used to love Trausch's column.
And I'm glad that her writing still graces the paper, even if I now
have to try to guess which editorials are hers.

Friday, June 06, 2003

"I have done more of the work
that has appeared under other people's by-lines than they have."
It would be wise to reserve judgment about this
e-mail from New York
Times stringer Thomas Long that Al Giordano obtained (and which I
found via InstaPundit).

But someone ought to interview Long
and other stringers and get to the bottom of this. It's really
shocking stuff, although I think Long's anger at Seth Mnookin (him
again!) is misdirected.

Thursday, June 05, 2003

A worthy sendoff for a great
journalist. Hundreds of people turned out this morning at the JFK
Library for a memorial service for the Boston Globe's
Elizabeth
Neuffer, who -- along with
her translator, Waleed Khalifa Hassan Al Dulaimi -- were killed in a
car accident in Iraq on May 9.

I did not take notes -- somehow it
would have seemed disrespectful -- but I can report that it was
dignified, emotional, and fitting for someone whose foreign
correspondence represented the best that the news media can
offer.

Editorial-page editor Renée
Loth presided over a program that included remembrances by editor
Marty Baron, former Ambassador Swanee Hunt, staff reporters Farah
Stockman and Anne Barnard, retired Globe staff member Susan
Trausch [Correction: Trausch is still employed as an editorial writer for the paper], foreign editor Jim Smith, and Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha
Power, who -- like Stockman -- credited Neuffer with starting her on
her journalism career.

Especially moving was a tribute by
her longtime companion, Washington-bureau chief Peter
Canellos.

The Reverends Ray and Gloria
White-Hammond opened and closed the service, which was held in a huge
anteroom, a wall of windows behind the speakers, with Boston Harbor
and the city skyline barely visible amid the fog and mist.

Neuffer's friends put together a
memorial book called Remembering Elizabeth. It closes with
this handwritten note:

To Whomever Finds
This:

This is being written at the end
of 1999 -- and at the beginning of a new millennium. It is also
the end of a century, what has been one of the bloodiest centuries
ever seen -- despite the incredible advancements mankind has made
in science, the arts, and medicine. As a foreign correspondent for
The Boston Globe -- which hopefully still is a newspaper
that publishes in New England! -- I had some part in seeing some
of this bloodshed while reporting on wars in the Gulf, Bosnia, and
Rwanda. I would hope by the time you find this note, wars are
extinct. But if they are not, please think again -- and stop them.
I'd like to think the next millennium will be one in which people
are not killed -- or prejudiced against -- because of their race,
ethnicity or religion. In fact, all of us in 1999 are counting on
you to ensure the future is one of peace. Please make it
so.

What did Mnookin know and when
did he know it? One offers even mild criticism of
Newsweek's Seth Mnookin at one's peril (see item below). I'm
beginning to think there are at least three Mnookins out there, each
one of them reporting 18 hours a day.

Okay, we're still probably some
period of time from knowing who the next executive editor of the
New York Times will be, especially since -- with Joe Lelyveld
temporarily back at the helm -- there's no need to act
precipitously.

Baron to NY? Uh, not so
fast.Newsweek's Seth Mnookin has identified Boston
Globe editor Marty
Baron as a possible
replacement for New York Times executive editor Howell Raines,
should Raines be ousted or leave.

But wait! Baron and two other
people Mnookin identifies as "obvious candidates" -- Times
columnist Bill Keller, who was managing editor in the previous
regime, and Los Angeles Times managing editor Dean Baquet,
who, like Baron, once served in the editing ranks of the NY
Times -- all say they haven't been contacted about the
job.

Mnookin has been a force of nature
on the whole Times/Raines/Jayson Blair saga. But is this
really a story?

Meanwhile, Slate's Mickey
Kaus has put Raines's
chances of departing at 70
percent. I would say that 90 percent or 10 percent would be just as
good a guess, wouldn't you?

The people behind
MoveOn.org.Good
article in today's
Washington Post about MoveOn.org,
which has grown in less than five years from a Web site opposed to
Bill Clinton's impeachment to a major center of online activism for
causes such as opposition to the war in Iraq and media
reform.

Here's
a Q&A with MoveOn.org's
campaigns director, Eli Pariser, by the Portland Phoenix's Sam
Pfeifle. And here's
a closer look at MoveOn.org
by AlterNet's Don Hazen.

Still more on why Saddam didn't
save himself. Alexander Knapp has a smart, long post on Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. He thinks the evidence supports their
existence, and worries that they fell into the hands of
terrorists
and/or mercenaries when US
troops rolled in.

Read the whole thing, but here's
his conclusion:

If it turns out that Iraqi
materials or weapons have fallen into the hands of terrorists, and
those weapons are used against Western targets, then Bush,
Rumsfeld, and Franks will all have a lot to answer for. And as
I've said before, for their simple negligence in failing to secure
suspected WMD sites, I think that Rumsfeld and Franks should be
sacked. At the very, very least.

New in this week's
Phoenix. Media reformers say that the FCC's
outrageous deregulatory
ruling this past Monday has mobilized the public for the first time
in decades -- and that the agency's vote could kick off a new wave of
activism. Also, the media try to figure out what
really happened at the
National Museum of Iraq.

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

More on why Saddam didn't save
himself. Got several e-mails in response to my
item yesterday asking why
Saddam Hussein -- if he really didn't have weapons of mass
destruction -- failed to save himself by being genuinely cooperative
with UN weapons inspectors.

M.O. pointed me to this
Washington Post piece by MIT's Michael
Schrage, arguing that
Saddam played a game of chicken and lost. In this scenario, Saddam
claimed not to have WMDs but refused to prove it, thus making it
appear he might be lying, and thus keeping his neighbors
discombobulated. Schrage writes:

In fact, WMD ambiguity was
at the core of Iraq's strategy. Why? Because if it ever became
unambiguously clear that Iraq had major initiatives underway in
nuclear or bio-weapons, America, Israel and even Europe might
intervene militarily. If, however, it ever became obvious that
Iraq lacked the unconventional weaponry essential to inspiring
fear and inflicting horrific damage, then the Kurds, Iranians and
Saudis might lack appropriate respect for Hussein's imperial
ambitions. Ambiguity thus kept the West at bay while keeping
Hussein's neighbors and his people in line. A little rumor of
anthrax or VX goes a long way.

R.D. sent a long, thoughtful
e-mail, the heart of which is this:

Suppose for a minute that
Iraq really did dismantle its chemical and biological weapons
programs in 1995, as has been reported by a senior Iraqi defector.
From the Iraqi standpoint, the entire WMD allegation takes on the
character of a massive snipe hunt. No amount of access will ever
be enough to satisfy the Bush administration. And, as Iraqi
leaders pointed out, never in history had any power assembled an
army as large as the one at the border of Iraq without eventually
using it....

My problem is that I don't see
any evidence that is inconsistent with the thesis that Iraq had
not had any chemical weapons since 1995. I saw very detailed
allegations, which later turned out to be overblown, faked, or the
outdated work of graduate students. So now we're supposed to
believe that, even though the evidence was bad, the accusation was
good. As a scientist, I find this attitude bizarre.

R.D. also took me to task for
indirectly quoting UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix as calling
Iraq's December report worthless. A bit glib, I'll concede, though I
still think it accurately characterizes Blix's overall
assessment.

As for R.D.'s larger argument, I'll
stick to my original point: if Saddam really didn't have WMDs, and if
he had made a genuine attempt to explain what had happened to those
weapons that the UN knew he had once had, then President Bush would
have been faced with two options: (1) go to war alone, with no one,
not even Tony Blair, to back him up; or (2) back down.

Either of those options would have
been -- should have been -- far more palatable to Saddam than what
actually happened. But, then, who knows what goes on in the mind of
Saddam Hussein?

W.W.S. pointed me to
this
post on his blog, Pepper
Gray, which is a variation of the Schrage argument. And E.R. called
my attention to this,
which says that Iraq's WMDs may have been moved to Syria -- although
she cautions, "I have no idea how reliable these people are."
Certainly that seemed to be a working theory in the immediate
aftermath of Saddam's fall, though we haven't heard much about it
lately.

My favorite explanation, though,
comes from R.G.H., who suggests that Iraq had long since lost its WMD
capability -- but no one dared tell Saddam! He writes:

I like the theory that he
didn't know he didn't have WMD because his underlings were afraid
to tell him they no longer had the resources to rebuild the
capability.

In college, I had a history prof
who was a retired Air Force colonel. He told a story about taking
control of the German Air Force headquarters in Bavaria at the end
of WWII. The Allies were concerned that their small numbers would
be unable to keep the Wehrmacht officers under control if they
were arrested and imprisoned. So, instead, the Allies essentially
locked the gate to the command compound and, as the command
continued to issue orders to a non-existent air force, the Allies
scooped them up and destroyed them. The command officers, having
their time occupied, never posed a threat to escape or cause other
problems.

This was told to describe the
German personality, but I think it's a fair description of the
military mindset, as well. Orders are issued and it is assumed
that they are followed. Certainly Saddam would assume that it
would be the case.

Then, put yourself in the place
of one of Saddam's lieutenants: "I'm not telling him. YOU tell
him."

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

In the nine or so months that
"Ideas" has been coming out, I haven't quite known what to make of
it. I know people who love it; and I know people who really, really
hate it. If pressed against the wall and forced to give an answer, I
guess I'd say I like it, but not all the time, and that in some
respects it still doesn't feel like it's quite gelled.

"Ideas" runs some terrific stuff.
At the same time, I'd like to see more policy pieces, especially on
local issues. In other words, maybe move it just a bit toward what
was offered by the old "Focus" section, which it replaced.

Anyway, Star comes across in the
interview as smart and interesting.

And here is my favorite chunk from
"Ideas" since its debut, a hilarious meditation on old age headlined
"Would You Let Your Grandmother Marry a Rolling Stone?", published
last October and written by Joe Sacco and Gerry Mohr:

Perhaps you prefer the
implacable dignity of Bob Dylan, who, in recent years, has recast
himself as a romantically world-weary and crusty old man. This
might be how you like to imagine yourself aging -- wisely, your
face to the wind, with, as Shakespeare's Prospero mused, "every
third thought [about the] grave." The Stones, on the other
hand, are aging pretty much how you are likely to -- gracelessly,
scared witless, clutching and clawing at the years that run
through your fingers, dancing like a maniac when you think someone
half your age is watching, and generally making yourself a
laughingstock.

If Saddam didn't have WMDs, why
didn't he prove it? We should all be outraged by the Bush
administration's untruths as to whether Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction. Saddam's alleged chemical, biological, and nascent
nuclear capabilities were, after all, the principal argument offered
by the White House for going to war in the first place.

Still, this is a bit more
complicated than some elements of the antiwar left would have it.
Last night, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff appeared on
The
David Brudnoy Show, on
WBZ Radio (AM 1030), to talk about his
latest article, regarding
the way US officials bent intelligence to suit their needs. That's
how the phony stories about the aluminum tubes and the uranium from
Niger made their way into the public consciousness.

New York Times columnist
Paul
Krugman today goes hyperbolic,
writing, "The public was told that Saddam posed an imminent threat.
If that claim was fraudulent, the selling of the war is arguably the
worst scandal in American political history -- worse than Watergate,
worse than Iran-contra."

I usually am delighted with
Krugman's heated Bush-whacking. But, in this case, he and other
critics are forgetting about one key fact. Last December, Iraq
submitted a
12,200-page, UN-mandated report
on its weapons program that chief weapons inspector Hans Blix
denounced as worthless.

Weapons inspectors knew for a fact
that Saddam had an active program for producing WMDs at one time.
Yet, when faced with invasion and overthrow, Saddam refused to say
whether he still had those weapons -- or, if he didn't, what he had
done with them. Nor was he particularly cooperative with Blix and
nuclear-weapons inspector Mohammed ElBareidi.

Thus, if Iraq didn't have WMDs,
Saddam refused to take the opportunity to prove it and thus stave off
the end of his brutal, bloody regime.

President Bush now has a chaotic
mess on his hands -- a mess that was predicted by those of us who
opposed going to war without an explicit UN mandate.

Nevertheless, given that it now
seems clear that Iraq's WMD capability was, at the very least,
nowhere near as great as the White House had claimed, it is a mystery
as to why Saddam didn't do more to save his worthless, evil
ass.

Monday, June 02, 2003

Designer babies or not? MIT
scientist Steven Pinker has a fascinating essay on so-called
designer
babies in the Ideas section
of yesterday's Globe. Pinker's bottom line: the prediction
that embryos will be genetically engineered so that children will be
smarter, taller, better-natured, or whatever is little more than
futuristic hype. Genetics, he writes, is a whole lot more complicated
than is popularly believed.

Yet Pinker places an oddly
artificial limit on his own predictive abilities when he writes: "Not
only is genetic enhancement not inevitable, it is not particularly
likely in our lifetimes." In our lifetimes? Is that what we're really
talking about? What about 100 years from now, or 500, or
1000?

Last year, University of California
scientist Gregory Stock offered a very different view in his book
Redesigning
Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic
Future. Stock concedes
the difficulty and, ultimately, the futility of direct manipulation
of genes -- although he doesn't rule it out entirely.

Instead, he focuses much of his
attention on a truly mind-bending concept: artificial chromosomes
that could hold genes that fight disease, enhance intelligence, and
the like. Such an approach, he argues, would be both easier and safer
than "germline" engineering, the term for manipulating genes so that
the changes will be passed on from generation to
generation.

By contrast, the Stockian approach
would limit any changes to the individual on which they are
made.

In one particularly fanciful
section, Stock writes:

Human conception is
shifting from chance to conscious design.... Imagine that a future
father gives his baby daughter chromosome 47, version 2.0, a
top-of-the-line model with a dozen therapeutic gene modules. By
the time she grows up and has a child of her own, she finds 2.0
downright primitive. Her three-gene anticancer module pales beside
the eight-gene cluster of the new version 5.9, which better
regulates gene expression, targets additional cancers, and has
fewer side effects. The anti-obesity module is pretty much the
same in both versions, but 5.9 features a whopping nineteen
antivirus modules instead of the four she has and an anti-aging
module that can maintain juvenile hormone levels for an extra
decade and retain immune function longer too. The daughter may be
too sensible to opt for some of the more experimental modules for
her son, but she cannot imagine giving him her antique chromosome
and forcing him to take the drugs she uses to compensate for its
shortcomings. As far as reverting to the pre-therapy, natural
state of 23 chromosomes pairs, well, only Luddites would do that
to their kids.

Is this where we're going? Is it a
good idea? Who knows? But I do know this: although I would certainly
not presume to argue with Professor Pinker, the changes that may lie
ahead in generations to come are bound to be far more formidable than
anything we can imagine happening "in our lifetimes."

About Media Log Archives

The Boston Phoenix's Media Log was launched in 2002 by the paper's then-media columnist, Dan Kennedy, who continued it until he left the paper in 2005. The Phoenix's current media columnist, Adam Reilly, is now the author of Media Log, which has since been renamed Don't Quote Me. Kennedy, an assistant professor of journalism at Northeastern University, blogs at Media Nation.